


Birds of a Feather

by psocoptera



Category: The Turn of the Story - Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: Established Relationship, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, M/M, Original Character(s), ethically dubious adoption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 04:32:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8387302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: Luke gets captured by goblins and meets some people.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a sequel to my story "Further On", but all you really need to know from that is that shortly after _Wings in the Morning_ some very-not-humanoid people from the "deep otherlands" came looking for Elliot, who had a reputation for being willing and able to talk to less-humanoid people.
> 
> This story takes place five or six years after that, when Luke and Serene are co-commanding a long-term mission into the deep otherlands to ~~seek out new life and new civilizations~~ learn more about the peoples and conflicts there that might spill over into the Border areas, win new allies and new support for protecting the Border, and generally wander around preaching peace and cooperation and interfering in local affairs with mostly positive outcomes. Elliot is totally laying the groundwork for ~~the United Federation of Planets~~ a League of Peoples in another thirty or forty years, although Luke doesn't know that yet.
> 
> Some notes at the end regarding ethically dubious adoptions and a few other matters.

Luke was almost asleep on the aviary crossbeam when the unicorn slammed into the wall of bars below.

He startled, losing his balance, and his wings came out automatically to catch him. The unicorn, below, snorted and pawed and looked around balefully.

"Asshole," Luke muttered. Forty-one days in the cage with it had not endeared the unicorn to him in the slightest, nor him to it. He was sleep-deprived, wing-sore, and only constant reminders to himself that the unicorn was not the real enemy had kept him from doing something drastic.

His stomach growled. Luke looked between his perch, such as it was, and the fruit trees arrayed down the middle of the aviary. The tops were picked clean, by now; the undersides, down in horn range, could only be attempted when the unicorn was asleep. The enchanted lights, way up above the aviary in the cavern roof, told him that time was still some hours off.

The unicorn threw itself into the bars again.

"You seem agitated," Luke said to it, not that he thought it could hear him over its own grunting. "Even for you, this is a lot."

He squinted out into the walkways outside the aviary, the galleries along the cavern wall, but he couldn't see any keepers, or unexpected off-hours visitors. The unicorn hated most of the goblins as much as it hated Luke, so it was useful as a warning system for being watched, at least.

He looked up and down the length of the aviary again. The parakeets were flocked up on the mesh of the back wall, the butterflies were tireless white flags in the flowers, he could see the fountain denizens curled up in the fountain, Niefynyff was half in, half out of her tree, and nobody had their head sticking out of the chimney, suggesting that the kids in the stone nest might actually be asleep.

He had almost convinced himself that the unicorn really was just being an asshole when the lights flickered.

The unicorn squealed. Luke snapped into full battle alertness. A door he hadn't known about popped open from the stone of the cavern wall, and the dearest, most missed voice in the world muttered, "bugger".

Even in battle mode, Luke couldn't help the grin that broke out across his face. It only got bigger when the lights flickered again and then suddenly dropped to "nighttime" levels, without the drawn-out dimming that passed for sunset in the cavern.

He dropped off the crossbeam to grab at the bars just above where the unicorn was still thrashing, flapping to help hold his weight. Even in the low and almost colorless light, Luke could see the expected glint of red hair on the approaching figure.

The sword was a surprise though.

"Okay, so I'm going to unlock - " Elliot said, when he was close enough to be heard over the unicorn, at the same time Luke started "You're going to have to - "

For just a moment, they smiled at each other. The relief was premature - they were still on opposite sides of the aviary wall, let alone who-knew-how-far deep into goblin territory - but Luke couldn't help feeling it.

"Anyone else in your party on this level?" he said.

"Serene and Golden are in the control booth," Elliot said, pointing up. "Everyone else is holding doors, basically."

"Right," Luke said. "So, I can't gather everyone up with the unicorn in here, so let's get you in here, let it loose out there, and there will probably be goblins here to distract it by the time we're ready to go?"

"Probably," Elliot said grimly, and Luke saw, suddenly, the way he held his sword. Elliot had fought, to get this far, and Luke's heart broke, a little. "But," Elliot said, "Everyone?"

"Explain as we go," Luke said, "Can you jump..." he reached down. "This high?"

The actual exchange of Elliot for the unicorn was a five-second nightmare of fraught timing and scramble and Luke almost missing one of Elliot's wrists, when he caught him to swing him over the door and in. But then Luke had his feet on the ground and Elliot in his arms, Elliot cupping his face frantically.

Luke let himself take one long breath, and then he was pulling Elliot by the hand towards the stone chimney.

"There's a nymph, but no one else in the big cage talks," Luke said. "But Bruce definitely understands. Butterfly Girl... I don't know. Bruce can't hold onto her while he's flying, but... this sounds awful, but we made a sort of leash..."

"Wait," Elliot said, not slowing down, "You've been... figuring out who can talk?"

"Obviously," Luke said. "I think the birds are just birds, and that one is just a ball of rage - " he jerked his head back over his shoulder, where the unicorn, not finding anything on the cavern floor to attack, was hurling itself against the cage from the outside - "but everyone else _might_ be people, at least."

"Oh," Elliot said, weirdly softly, and then they were at the chimney, and Luke flew up to look down into the nest.

They _looked_ asleep - like a folded packet of bat wings with butterfly wings sticking out - but the butterfly wings were trembling, and Luke could see that Bruce's feet were positioned to kick them over the edge of the nest in a flash.

"Safe," Luke said. "Up. Door. Rescue."

Bruce kicked, dropped, and came up flapping, awkwardly holding one of the butterfly girl's arms in his toes.

"Oh, wow," Elliot said, seeing them for the first time - the toddler-sized bat boy and the doll-sized winged girl. Luke found the leash-string in the nest and started tying it around Butterfly Girl's waist, being careful of her wings. She flailed with her arms - she was probably making faces at him too, although it was hard to tell in the dark, with her face so small.

Luke tied the other end around Bruce's foot.

"You, door," he said. "Me, first fountain, then door."

Bruce dipped his ears twice and took off in the right direction, tugging Butterfly Girl along, and Luke landed to run along with Elliot.

"What's in the fountain?" Elliot asked.

"Umbergrub," Luke said. "Which - good thing we've actually met those before, I never would have guessed that thing was someone's kid. Other one I don't know."

Umbergrubs looked like larvae the size of an award-winning vegetable marrow, but they metamorphosed into intelligent two-legged antlions, the umberfolk, who were some of their major allies in the deep otherlands.

Luke went to the umbergrub's corner first, scooped it up, and set it in Elliot's arms. Elliot staggered a little.

"Golden's cloak should make a good sling if we can get that far," he said.

Luke was hurrying around the fountain to the far diagonal corner, where the whatever-it-was was stirring. He was just in time to catch it by the tail, switching to a hold around its scaly middle when he swung it out of the water.

Elliot was making an Elliot face.

"Luke," he said. "I think that's an alligator."

"Animal?" Luke double-checked. The word sounded familiar - "A is for alligator" from some long-ago book - but he couldn't remember at all what sort of picture had gone with that.

"Yeah," Elliot said. "From across the Wall in, um, America mostly? I think?"

"Oh," Luke said. "We don't have those." He dropped it back into the fountain in relief.

"That should make this much easier," he said. "It never would do anything obviously smart, but it never attacked any of us, either, even though it tears into meat when they feed it. Never even went after the umbergrub. I thought maybe it knew it was a person."

"If it turns out there's a deep otherlands race that looks exactly like alligators, I'm going to feel terrible," Elliot said. "But we're running out of time."

"We actually have one more stop," Luke said. Niefynyff's tree was even with the fountain near the edge of the aviary, over on the far side. He ripped off the remaining rag of his shirt, soaked it in the fountain, and started running again. Elliot, eyebrows up, followed.

"How's it going?" Luke called to her.

"Thif if veyyey harv," Niefynyff said. "Imavine stuffinv vor bovvy innu or shoe."

She was squeezing, slowly and obviously painfully, into a sucker-shoot growing out from the base of her tree. The part of her head still sticking out was weirdly distorted, like a flat drawing seen from a sharp angle.

Luke dropped to his knees and started digging at the base of the shoot.

"Shoulv ve loosh," the nymph said. Elliot dropped down next to him and started digging too.

"About a foot out," Luke said. "We need to leave a rootball - she's prepared it, just don't dig into the root mat." It was almost more like brushing something off than actual digging, until Luke found the one solid root that linked the shoot with the main trunk of the tree.

"I need to borrow your sword," Luke told Elliot. And then, to Niefynyff, "Are you _sure_?"

Her head was all the way inside, but with her hand, the last part of her sticking out, she gave him a thumbs-up before it too pulled in and vanished.

Elliot gave him the sword, setting down the umbergrub to extract it from his sword belt. Elliot didn't say "no, this is impossible," or maybe he just respected the choice of someone who would rather die than be left behind, but he didn't say "don't", so Luke swung and chopped. The root parted. Both trees shuddered.

Luke quickly wrapped the rootball in his wet shirt, what remained of it, picked it up, and made for the door, dodging around the fruit trees it would awkward to pass under while carrying a five-foot sapling. The umbergrub was probably heavier but it felt too complicated to switch - he was suddenly almost breathless with urgency. He realized the unicorn had stopped bashing into the cage and was charging the far end of the cavern. Their escape had been discovered.

"Okay," Elliot said, "Archers? Bolas? If we can cross the floor, it's just two flights of those stupid goblin stairs to our exit - "

"We have to go to the individual cells on the third gallery," Luke said. "There's - the rest of the menagerie there."

"Luke," Elliot started, and Luke could hear in his voice that he was going to say no, that he would leave people behind, to get Luke out.

"They've got the gnome king's missing daughter," Luke said, and just the chance they might hear news of her had been on Elliot's list of reasons to come down to the underlands in the first place.

They made it across the floor, Bruce flying between Elliot and Luke, the unicorn charging back towards them but not fast enough, and meanwhile getting in the way of the goblin bolas-throwers, and up the awkward tiny goblin stairs, and then it turned out Serene and Golden were already opening cells in the third gallery and had collected the gnome king's daughter, a surly adolescent troll, and a goat. The last occupied cell held a wolf, who was pacing back and forth along the bars, watching them.

"Ought I?" Serene asked from the door, holding the keys.

The gnome princess said something.

"The goblins claim he's a werewolf but she's never seen him change," Elliot translated. "Are werewolves real now? Luke's got a fairy, why not?"

Serene, correctly deciding that what might be real was an unnecessary complication at this point, unlocked the cage. The wolf didn't spring for anyone's throat, although the goat nervously moved to the other side of the troll, who had also taken the umbergrub from Elliot.

Serene dropped the keys, unslung Luke's sword belt from her shoulder, and handed it to him.

"I've got point, you've got the rear," she said. "It's a long day out, let's go."

*

It was over twenty-four hours before they could dare to stop and rest for more than a few minutes; twenty-four hours of forced march that meant that Elliot and Serene and Golden had been awake and moving for more than two days straight. Closer to three, Elliot had said absently, when they had stopped long enough to gnaw on cheese and oatcakes. They were gathering up the whole rest of the company as they went, teams who had been intercepting messengers and causing distractions and all the necessary supports of getting the rescue team in and out again, and of course they all wanted to see with their own eyes that the co-commander was okay.

Luke was pretty tired of being gawped at, from all those days of goblins, but they were more arms to haul Niefynyff and the umbergrub, and more canteens to pour over them against their drying out, and most importantly they were his people, so he tried to smile and nod appreciatively. Still, when they finally got to stop, he wrapped Elliot in his wings and went instantly to sleep without speaking to anyone at all.

He woke up uncertain of how much time had passed. Elliot was tense in his arms: holding still, but not actually asleep.

"Trouble?" Luke whispered.

"You're safe, all clear," Elliot whispered back, quieter than he ever bothered being. Luke moved enough to nuzzle his hair; it would be invisible under the wings.

"Battle fatigue?" he guessed.

"What does it say," Elliot said, almost soundlessly, "That when they took you, I lost all my principles, and you gained them."

Luke tightened his arms around Elliot. It was hard to think of anything to say. Of course it was awful for Elliot to have, at long last, taken up arms, but it was a kind of awful that Luke had always believed was necessary, and Elliot knew that; Luke couldn't _sympathize_ , in the sense of believing Elliot had done something wrong. On the other hand, his beloved was hurting, and Luke remembered his first kill, to save Elliot, so many years ago. Elliot had managed to comfort him, when his own feelings must have been much harder to put aside.

"You saved me because you did everything you could do," Luke whispered. "Everything I did, making prison alliances, I was hoping you would come, and you did."

Elliot's hand felt carefully along Luke's ribs; they were probably standing out more than they usually did. Luke wasn't really meant to live on a diet of fruit and the occasional parakeet.

"I can't even wish I took longer," Elliot whispered. "Maybe they would have eventually negotiated, maybe we could have gotten in here on bribes if we'd had the right bribes, but, Luke, forty-four days. I wasn't even sure if you were alive or not."

He moved his hand from Luke's ribs to his heart, like he still needed to check.

"I wasn't sure how long they had me drugged," Luke whispered. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't _you_ apologize," Elliot said, much louder, and Serene said "Yes, I think they are awake," audible through the muffling effect of the wings.

Luke sighed and unwrapped them and sat up.

"I'm sorry, sir," a lieutenant said, "But we need to move, one more push gets us into the gnome lands," and there was nothing for it but to get up and keep going.

*

The whole way along, Luke's eyes had been watering whenever they stepped into a cave that saw natural light, which he had been telling himself was just unfamiliar brightness, after more than a month underground. The goblin lights, or the gnome-made torches the company carried, were leagues beyond anything they had at Border camp, but were still nothing like sunlight. Luke kept telling himself that it was just the brightness right up until they squeezed through a partially-blocked passage and out into open air, and then he couldn't help himself: he leapt, straight up, unfurled his wings, and just kept climbing. Up, up, up, until there was just sky all around, and the trees and little figures of the company looking up at him far below.

It was stupid; it made him an instant target, if anyone was around with longbows or umbercannon, and it put the whole company at risk of being noticed. He just couldn't help it. All those days in the cage he'd had to flutter and perch but he hadn't been able to really fly, not like this. He blinked more water away from his eyes. Even from so high up, he could spot Elliot's hair easily, and see that his face was upturned, but he had no idea what kind of expression it might have.

 _Impatient_ , Luke assumed fondly, and then he was so intent on dropping back down to Elliot that he almost smacked face-first into Bruce before he saw him.

Bruce was flapping hard to gain altitude, unable to soar like Luke could, but he was beaming a big toothy grin. Luke snatched him out of the air and tucked him under his arm. They had done that sometimes in the aviary - it felt weird to say "snuggled", but, "huddled", maybe. It had been nice to be close to someone when Luke was lonely, and after Bruce had decided he trusted him, he had crawled into his lap while they sat on the crossbeams, or landed on his shoulders, or hung from his toes. Lots of kinds of bats lived in giant colonies, Luke knew. Maybe bat-people were similar. Bruce wasn't able to tell him what life was like among his people, or even how long he had been a captive of the goblins, but he seemed to like having company.

Luke landed by Elliot, who was looking thoughtful rather than exasperated.

"He just took off," Elliot said, motioning to Bruce. "Thought at first he was leaving, not going to you. This might not be the best place, so close to goblin territory?"

Luke pulled Bruce a little closer. "Of course we're not just turning him loose," he said. "Someone in the deep otherlands must know where his people are." He looked down at Bruce. "Yeah, Bruce? Stay close?"

Bruce dipped his ears twice, and Elliot frowned. "You named him? You named him _Bruce_?"

Luke shrugged. "He agreed," he said. "I had to call him something. Bruce from your story, about Bat Man."

"Of course," Elliot said. "Bat Man. Well." He gave him a little wave. "Pleased to meet you, Bruce."

Bruce dipped his ears twice and grinned again, and Elliot grinned back, startled and intent in his Elliot way.

*

It was surprisingly hard to say goodbye to the gnome king's daughter, who Luke had only known for a day at the very beginning, while he was recovering enough to be safely put in with the unicorn. It was stupid - she was literally being welcomed back into the loving and well-armed arms of her royal family, vastly safer in their citadel than Luke's perpetually wandering company, but he still felt uneasy about the idea of not _knowing for sure she was safe_ , once they moved on.

"You know, she learned a lot of Goblin while they had her," Elliot told him, who had of course extracted as much of it out of her as he could while they escorted her home. "Kidnapping her - maybe they just wanted to collect her, but they created someone who's going to be able to parlay with their patrols. Harder for the rank and file to believe all non-goblins are monsters if they're talking to them. She'll be a real threat to their isolationism, long term."

"I know," Luke said. It wasn't rational worry about her prospects, although, Elliot _would_ think it was the most comforting thing in the world that she had a future in negotiation. It was like the way Luke had to check on the umbergrub in its travel tub, or got nervous if someone other than himself or Bruce had Butterfly Girl's leash for too long.

"At last comes the end of our fellowship," Elliot muttered, when Luke tried to explain. "At least we're skipping the Scouring of the Shire."

Luke had no idea what he was talking about, but he was forty-one days deprived of Elliot muttering, so he just touched his thumb to the corner of Elliot's mouth, and went back to where Serene was sorting out their re-provisioning with the gnome king's seneschal. The gnomes hadn't had any idea about bat or butterfly people, so the company was heading to the umberlands next, to hand off the grub, and then back out towards the Border to the trolls and nymphs, unless the umberfolk had a better lead on Bruce.

Niefynyff's sapling had been planted in its own traveling tub, but Niefynyff had yet to come out of it. Luke was trying not to think too hard about what that might mean. Maybe the soil just tasted bad, or she was resting. He kept waking up at night, heart pounding, thinking he had heard her voice or felt the brush of her leafy fingers, only to realize that Bruce-and-Butterfly Girl had moved and he now had her wings in his face, or that Elliot was muttering Goblin and Gnomish vocabulary in his sleep.

*

The umberfolk welcomed them enthusiastically - Elliot was still seen as something of a hero, after the affair of the Wall, and bringing back a stolen child didn't do anything to dispel that impression. The local umberlord insisted on throwing them one of the lengthy all-liquid banquets that Elliot enjoyed and Luke loathed, and then the umberlady announced that she'd chemidentified the grub's lineage and was shipping it off in the appropriate direction and thanked Elliot personally, when he hadn't even known it was there in the fountain until Luke said they had to bring it. Luke mostly stopped his eyes from rolling. The only really good part of the banquet was that Butterfly Girl took little sips of all the liquids and made funny arm-waving reactions to some of the tastes, kicking her tiny feet in disgust or eagerness to eat more.

"I hope none of this is bad for her," Elliot said, frowning. Luke had no idea - she'd eaten fruit from his hand, sometimes, in the cage, although she'd never seemed to be asking for it. She had spent as much time with him as Bruce had, but it had never felt purposeful. No fruit-tossing games, or taunting the unicorn, she just flapped around, or sat, the three of them perched up in the cross-beams while visiting goblins pointed and gaped.

Bruce had gone the other way and was trying no banquet-liquids at all, nibbling on an oatcake he'd smuggled in in the little trousers someone had made for him. Butterfly Girl was still naked - she had shown no interest in the skirt someone had offered her, and she was so tiny and delicate that even Serene wasn't sure she could wrestle her into clothes without hurting her.

"Maybe they don't wear clothes," Elliot had snapped, irritated, like of all the possible problems, he couldn't believe anyone was thinking about that one. Luke wanted him to like Butterfly Girl, although he couldn't even exactly say why; she was so different from Bruce, so much less interactive. Maybe it was that in the cage they had come as a set. Or just that the elaborate stripe and shimmer of her wings had been beautiful, in an ugly place.

The local umberscholars had no insights about where the goblins might have captured either Bruce or Butterfly Girl. Maybe someone would in the capital, at the big school, or maybe the ostraka would know. There was an ostrakan embassy deeper into the umberlands, although the ostraka were from deeper yet, across a sea filled with serpents and kraken. Luke had a profound respect for the giant shrimp, since one of them had helped him get back to his proper universe that time he had accidentally gone out of it, but they were uncanny and unsettling and even Elliot couldn't talk to them without a translator.

"I think we need to get your nymph friend back to the nymphs," Serene said, when they sat down to decide where to head next. "Golden and I have been managing her watering, but there's not much else we know how to do for her. If there's anything that can be done."

It was a long, long way back to the nearest nymph woods, and of course she might not want to be planted in a random wood, if she could be woken up to be asked. She had never told Luke much about her family, or home, only that she had been in the aviary for years. She'd let him babble about Elliot and Serene though. If he could possibly get her home, he was going to do it.

"Yes," Luke said. "Nymphs."

*

"Check this out," Elliot said, finding Luke when they stopped for lunch. He had Bruce on his hip, and Butterfly Girl was following along behind them riding on the wolf's back, leash tied loosely around the wolf's neck.

"Huh," Luke said. "If neither of them minds, I guess."

Elliot scrunched up his face. "What?" he said, and then looked where Luke was looking. "Not that," he said. "Bruce, walk or fly?" Bruce chirped. "You want to walk?" Bruce dipped his ears twice. Elliot set him down and he waddled over to Luke, knuckling along on his wings to help, and looked up at him cheerfully.

"Bruce, apple or oatcake?" Elliot asked. Bruce clicked. "He wants your apple," Elliot said.

Luke handed it to him, and Bruce grabbed it with his wing-claws and took a big crunching bite.

"We're up to six words," Elliot said. "No idea if they're actually his language or if he's just making up sounds I can hear the difference between. But here's the best part!" He took two pieces of their precious paper supply out of his bag and held them up. They were simple, bold drawings of a human and an apple. "Bruce, apple?" Elliot asked, and Bruce pointed to the apple drawing in his left hand.

"His eyes can see pictures if the lines are dark enough!" Elliot crowed. "I think if we can make him a stylus he can hold, I might be able to teach him to read and write!"

Bruce dipped his ears twice and butted his head into Luke's hand, in the way that had come to mean he wanted the soft fur behind his head scratched.

"If I can teach him to read a map, maybe he'll even have some idea where he came from," Elliot said.

Luke felt a weird pang, hearing that. Also it didn't seem very likely, but then, Elliot's ideas never did, except when they suddenly worked.

He kept scratching behind Bruce's ears.

*

The nymphs of the first nymph wood, when they finally got to one, said it was almost too late for Niefynyff, and she would have to be planted there, whether or not she would have preferred somewhere else. They wouldn't let Luke stay for it, but they let him come back, after, to the grove they'd chosen for her, and sit at the edge of the freshly-turned earth for awhile.

"Someone's in there," one of the nymph-doctors said. Gardeners, Luke supposed. "But it's like she's - sleeping? Can't say if or when she'll wake up. When the seasons change, maybe."

It felt useless to say sorry, when she probably couldn't hear it, but Luke stretched as far as he could, until his fingertips could almost brush the sapling, and said it anyways. He could feel his eyes getting wet, the sunlight again, of course, she was planted in a sunny spot...

... and the times he had told her he wasn't sure if Elliot and Serene would be able to find him, and what Elliot had given up to do it, and how he hadn't been fast enough, if he had insisted on longer marches, longer days...

Luke was startled out of his thoughts, which he was aware enough to know were starting to spiral a bit, by a huff of breath from the wolf, and then Bruce settling against him, leaning against his knee. Butterfly Girl tugged against her leash, reaching towards Niefynyff.

"Hey," Luke said. "Untie?"

She turned partway towards him, although whether she had any idea what he was saying, or was just reacting to the sound of his voice, he'd never had any idea.

He reached out slowly to the tie around her waist and released it.

She darted forward, circling Niefynyff, flitting from leaf to leaf.

Luke realized, watching her, that he'd never asked Niefynyff which of the kids had come to the menagerie first, or how long ago. At some level he had always believed she would make it and be there to be asked.

Butterfly Girl came back to Bruce, some curiosity evidently satisfied. After awhile, the wolf came and put his head on Luke's other knee. After even longer, Elliot came and settled behind him, running his hands down Luke's wings and neatening his feathers. Luke could practically hear him biting his tongue on all the arguments he wanted to have with everything Luke had been thinking about, and probably any number of additional things that Elliot thought he would think about if their positions were reversed.

"You would have gotten along," Luke said finally. "She never gave up; she started growing escape shoots as soon as they planted her, when it was just her and the unicorn, just so she'd be ready."

"I'm glad you weren't alone," Elliot said, voice low, and Bruce clicked softly in reply.

*

"I think your tender masculine feelings do you credit," Serene announced.

Luke, who definitely hadn't gone behind a tree to wipe his eyes over the departure of the troll (and the goat, who had stuck as traveling companions), startled.

"It's only natural that you should feel close to those who shared your captivity," Serene went on. "Rrkjyr, for example, you must worry about going back when it was eir siblings who sold em into bondage in the first place."

Luke hadn't known the troll's name, let alone their story, but he could only guess that these details had been extracted by Elliot, probably then giving a great deal of advice in return.

"Should be okay," Luke said vaguely.

"It is not convoluted, for an Elliot plan," Serene said, confirming Luke's guesses. She looked at Luke uncertainly, to see if she'd been properly consoling.

"It's not that," Luke said. "It's..." He really hated to say "you wouldn't understand", but he couldn't imagine that she would.

"You should adopt Bruce if the ostraka do not know where he came from," Serene said bluntly.

Maybe she understood more than Luke thought. But still not enough.

"I can't adopt him," Luke said.

"Your paternal instincts are obviously engaged," Serene said. "And I know adoption is common among your people when children have lost both parents to war. It wouldn't even preclude finding a mother to bear a child for you and Elliot later."

"Glk," Luke said, which was his standard response whenever Serene brought up the hypothetical timing of his child-raising plans, and how they might fit with hers and Golden's. And then he sighed, because the question was specific and different enough to require an actual answer.

"Look," Luke said. "Never mind that he probably has people looking for him, we don't even know he's a child!" Serene squinted at him in confusion. "Yes, he's small, but so are goblins and gnomes. For all we know he could be older than I am. Maybe you're not wrong that I... feel something, but that's just in my head. I mean, Butterfly Girl, we don't even know that her people are people, it might be like calling the cat my daughter."

Serene blinked. "You _have_ been thinking about it."

Luke looked away. "Yeah. We were a weird little family in the cage, I guess part of me is still stuck there." He twitched one shoulder, a sort of semi-shrug, hoping Serene would interpret this as "Luke is sorting out his own head" and not "Luke's out-of-control emotions have rendered him unfit for co-command."

"You have been out much longer than you were in," Serene said. "You should talk to Elliot. His feelings can't be blamed on your ordeal, and he is also a man, as much as he denies his own sentiments."

Luke rejected the obvious rude replies and nodded; when something was so blatant that Serene was giving relationship advice, it was probably long overdue.

*

They were going up, to get out of troll territory, up and away from the Wall, up to a high pass that would eventually lead down to a valley, a plain, a long march back to umberholds and ostrakan embassies. The trees were getting taller as they climbed, towering firs and pines, needles underfoot, sweet resinous smells in the air. Good forest for harpies, except for being claimed by the trolls. The company's hunters brought down an elk and they all stopped to make an early camp and butcher and roast it, and Luke, on an impulse, grabbed Elliot and swooped him a hundred feet up, to a branch where they could sit and talk in privacy.

"Oh!" Elliot said when Luke settled, Elliot safely in his lap. "We haven't done this in awhile!"

And then Elliot was kissing him, warm and smiling, heedless of the drop below them, trusting that Luke would never let him go.

It wasn't what Luke had meant, but Luke kissed him back, out of habit, and then out of the sudden awareness that Elliot was right, it had been ages. He'd had Elliot sleeping in his arms, and there had been kisses, but not more, not Elliot squirming to get closer, Luke's hands tightening on his waist so he couldn't topple them off the branch, and had it really been since before the cage? How had Elliot not started something long since?

Luke broke away from the kiss.

"Are you okay? I mean, have you been? I - "

Elliot blinked and focused, looking hard at Luke until Luke's eyes almost crossed looking back. And then he sighed, melting into Luke so the heat between them was just warmth, just closeness.

"I had a bad week or two," he said.

"You should have said," Luke said.

"I wasn't going to talk about my guilt from rescuing you _to you_ ," Elliot said. "Besides, I thought about it, and unicorns are stupid. There's no such thing as purity, just because I did something once doesn't mean I ever have to do it again."

Luke thought for a weird moment that Elliot was talking about the standard kind of unicorn purity, but of course he wasn't, Elliot had never felt guilty about anything like that.

He was probably going to say something stupid if he tried to tell Elliot that it was okay, that he was still himself, so instead he took Elliot's hands and kissed them, knuckles and palms, and Elliot sighed again.

"I don't want the ostraka to know about bat people," Luke said, trading guilt for guilt. "I want to take Bruce home and see if he wants to play catch with my dad. I want my mom to think Butterfly Girl is the prettiest thing she's ever seen."

Elliot, insufferably Elliot, scoffed.

"Oh, _that's_ not gendered," he said, while Luke's heart sank for a awful second. "Your mom will probably try to arm her, do you think you have cocktail swords in your world?"

"Our world," Luke said automatically, and Elliot smiled. "But - "

Elliot squeezed Luke's hands. "I really don't know if the ostraka are going to know anything," he said. "But - look, what if they do? I've been thinking about this, and you know I want to found a school, an alternative to camp, I could do that anywhere, right? Maybe we get Bruce back to his family and then we stay and we're the crazy gay human uncles."

"The bat people could be months of travel from the Border," Luke said, but he was already smiling, Elliot forever whisking the rug out from under him with his plans. "The butterfly people could be months in the opposite direction."

"Well, I don't see them being parted," Elliot said. "Not to toot my own horn here, but I write vastly complicated multi-way treaties professionally, we can probably work out some custody and visitation."

"I didn't mean to make things complicated," Luke said.

"I would never ask you to leave behind someone you loved," Elliot said back. "Besides, we don't even know for sure there are bat people or butterfly people, it's not like we're the winged people. I had a fascinating conversation with Bruce about why the rest of us don't have wings."

"Oh god," Luke said. He wished he could cover his face, except he knew if he let go of Elliot he would probably fall out of the tree.

"Yeah," Elliot said cheerfully. "We've had kids for like three months and I already got stuck with the facts of life speech, it was great. I drew diagrams."

"It never occurred to me they might be... half something," Luke said. "I guess that's stupid, huh."

"They could be anything," Elliot said. "Humans used to put people with anomalies in sideshows, like, if they were born different somehow... it's kind of amazing to meet them with no preconceptions about who they can be or what they'll be able to do."

Elliot had said "we have kids" so casually, it was only just now hitting Luke that he had. And he talked about them with no sharp edges in his voice at all. Luke wanted to start kissing him all over again; he moved his hands back to Elliot's hips.

"I like this thought," Elliot said. "But, haha, there may be one minor downside of flying children, namely, they're heading this way right now and we're never going to have privacy in a tree again."

Luke looked, and, yep, they were, and, nope, they probably weren't. Bruce flapped valiantly (Luke felt momentarily bad for choosing a branch so high up, not that he'd had any thought of Bruce joining them there) until he was above them, then dropped down onto Luke's shoulders, and Butterfly Girl sat down on Elliot's head. (Elliot's eyes flicked up, but he held his head very still.) It was weirdly like being back in the aviary, only with Elliot there too.

"Bruce," Luke said, suddenly unable to wait, "Would you like to add my name, to your name?" He was trying to talk more naturally to Bruce, because Elliot said it would help him learn. "You could keep it as long as you like, and add it to any other names, or stop any time. I'm Luke Sunborn, so you'd be Bruce Sunborn."

"Excuse you," Elliot said immediately, "Sunborn-Schafer. Or maybe Schafer-Sunborn." He frowned like he was surprised he hadn't already figured that out, and honestly, Luke was a little surprised too. And shattered with love for him.

"Bruce Sunborn-Schafer, and Butterfly Girl could be - yes, Elliot?"

"If we're making this formal, she should have a better name of her own," Elliot said. "One that isn't just a descriptor."

"I was going to give her one when she could show she agreed to it," Luke said, "Only we never got that far."

Bruce, still on Luke's shoulders, chirped something, then clambered over Luke to squeeze into the space between him and Elliot.

He chittered out something long, much longer than anything he usually tried to tell them, pointing at himself, at Luke, at Butterfly Girl. Luke caught his words for all of them, but he couldn't understand the rest.

Elliot was listening in fierce concentration.

"I think he says he does want to be Bruce Sunborn-Schafer, and that I should give Butterfly Girl a name? Bruce, you want Bruce Sunborn-Schafer?"

Bruce dipped his ears twice.

"And Butterfly Girl should have a better name?"

Bruce pointed at Elliot. Elliot looked unusually daunted.

"Um," he said. "Mab? Titania? Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed? Tinkerbell?"

"We have Shakespeare on this side too," Luke pointed out. "What's that last one?"

"Forget I ever mentioned that," Elliot said quickly. "Um. Caroline? Like Caroline the Fair?"

Luke thought about it. You probably couldn't go wrong giving someone the name of an admirable historical figure, just in case later you had to explain to their mother or something how you'd had the nerve to go giving them new names in the first place.

"Okay," Luke said. "Caroline Sunborn-Schafer. You like that, Bruce?"

Bruce dipped his ears twice.

"Caroline?"

Elliot reached his hand carefully up to the top of his head. The tiny winged girl jumped into the air, away from his hand, but then settled with a few flaps down onto Bruce's ankles.

Elliot caught Luke's eye and smiled. Luke smiled back, although his eyes felt a little watery again. There was something profoundly satisfying about being here like this, Luke's arms around all three of them, his people down below busy making camp and updating maps and all the things they did.

Bruce chirped, something about the wolf.

"Sure," Elliot said, laughing a little, "We can ask the wolf too. But let's see if Caroline wants to answer first. Butterfly Girl? Caroline? Good?"

"Good?" Luke echoed.

She was swinging her feet, looking down towards the camp, but for just a moment, she looked up at Luke, and Luke would have sworn that, for the first time, she looked right at him.

**

**Author's Note:**

> Regarding adoption: I've written Luke as essentially moving ahead with formalizing his adoption of his fellow kidnappees before he's exhausted potential leads on finding their families of origin. Which really could make things harder for everyone later, if/when they finally find someone with deeper ties. But I think it's in character - like Serene mentions, a culture where a lot of adults die unexpectedly from violence probably has pretty strong norms around taking in orphans, and I think Luke would subconsciously feel like "it was about the time they had a permanent home" because it wouldn't take longer than that for the Border humans to track down living relatives or whatever. And of course Elliot has his own issues with wanting children to feel loved and wanted.
> 
> If you're worried about what happens next, it takes *years* for them to track down Bruce's people, who are very secretive, and when they finally find some, their best guess is that Bruce is a survivor from a colony that got wiped out in an epidemic, or maybe weakened by an epidemic and then finished off by the goblins. Bruce gets to meet some bat people who had relatives there and re-learn his own language and it's all kind of fucked up and sad but Elliot and Luke are good dads to talk to about feeling like you don't really fit in anywhere or have lost a world where you should have belonged. Meanwhile it turns out that fairies hatch from eggs, and Caroline's egg could have changed hands dozens of times before the goblins got it, and no one's even sure if there are any fairies left in the wild at all...
> 
> Other notes: I know Elliot is bi, but I don't think he would mind calling himself and Luke the crazy gay human uncles.
> 
> If you're wondering how Luke managed to get himself captured by goblins in the first place: he triggered a goblin booby trap in a cave involving a pit and a net and a fake wall and a rockfall, so to everyone else it looked like there was a small cave-in and when they cleared it he had vanished. He really should have known better but he thought the cavern they were in was safe and he was looking for a private corner where he could take Elliot.


End file.
